The Credit Downgrade: Symptom of the Marxist Disease

On August 5, 2011, the credit rate of the United States was downgraded for the first time in this country's history. That was a shot across the bow warning that Marxism can damage even the almighty United States.

Native Americans say that if you really want to know someone, you have to walk a mile in his moccasins. I walked in Marxist shoes over many miles and for many years, and I am convinced that if the Democratic Party has its way, it will transform the United States into a socialist country in all but name. During the 2008 election campaign, its leaders loudly announced that they would drastically increase taxes on the American rich — American businesses and their owners — in order to finance programs for the poor. In other words, that they would start transforming capitalist America into a socialist state.

If there had been any doubt in my mind that the Democratic Party was following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, that doubt vanished when the Democrats began ferociously fighting against extending the Bush tax cuts for individuals making more than $200,000 per year. That is core Marxism at its fundamental best. In his Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx urged his followers to "eradicate capitalism" and advocated ten “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” which became known as the Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto. Among them were: a heavy progressive or graduated income tax, abolition of all rights of inheritance, and abolition of property.[1]

It is time to call a spade a spade — this is Marxism we are talking about, pure and simple.

This bubonic plague of the last century killed tens of millions in the Soviet empire alone, but a young generation of Americans who know little about its destructive power decided to give it a new lease on life. In November 2008 the Democratic Party won the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress, and soon after that the United States began being changed from a country belonging to "We the People" into one managed by a kind of Marxist nomenklatura with unchecked power.

This new American nomenklatura started running the country secretly, just as all Marxist nomenklaturas did. "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” the leader of the nomenkatura in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, once told the media. That was a first in U.S. history. It did not take long before this American nomenklatura took control of home mortgages, banks, auto-makers, and most of the health care industry. When tens of thousands of Americans objected to the cloak of secrecy under which all this was taking place, the same Nancy Pelosi called them Nazis. That was exactly what all post-WWII Marxist nomenklaturas called their opponents.

On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed: "We Are All Socialists Now."[2] That was also what Romania's Marxist newspaper Scînteia proclaimed when the kingdom of Romania was changed into a "Popular Republic." The U.S. nomenklatura has produced the same results as Romania’s nomenklatura had — on a U.S. scale. Over fourteen million Americans are currently out of work, and 41.8 million people are on government food stamps. The national debt is at an unprecedented $13 trillion, and it is projected to reach $18 trillion by 2019.

Scînteia went bankrupt. Newsweek was sold for one dollar. But a member of the congresional nomenklatura representing the bankrupt state of California — who is also a staunch admirer and visitor of Fidel Castro’s Cuba — began preaching that the future of the U.S. oil industry was “all about socializing,” all about “the government taking over and running all our oil companies.”[3] In 1948, when the Romanian nomenklatura nationalized the oil industry, that country was the second greatest oil exporter in Europe. Thirty years later, when I broke with Marxism, Romania was a heavy importer of oil, gasoline was rationed, the temperature in public places had to be kept under 63 degrees, and all shops had to close no later than 5:30 pm to save energy.

In 1978, I paid with two death sentences — from my native Romania — for helping that country rid itself of Marxism, and I could write a whole book about how that deadly virus is now harming my new country, the United States. Maybe someday I will. Here I want only to mention an article published in, of all places, the Russian Pravda, which stated: "It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people."[4] A few conservative political luminaries, like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, have also warned that Marxism has begun infecting the United States. But neither the Tea Party's "Contract from America" nor the Republicans' "Pledge to America" mentions Marxism per se. Both contain mobilizing calls to cut taxes and domestic discretionary spending, but taxes and spending are just weapons. Our enemy is Marxism, which has always used the redistribution of wealth to change free market societies into ruinous welfare slums.

According to the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu, whose The Art of War is required reading for all CIA officers and military intelligence personnel, knowing your enemy is the most important element needed in order to defeat him. “Know your enemy and know yourself,” he wrote, “and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” It is time for today’s Americans to become acquainted with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.This is our enemy.